How Design Makes the World

by Scott Berkun

Everything in your life was designed by someone.

Designers made hundreds of decisions over weeks, months or years to create these things in your life. They had many possible choices, but you only get to experience their final decisions, for better or for worse.

The truth is that designing things well isn’t easy to do. And as a result, things that are hard to understand or that don’t work well are made all the time. Often we just overlook them.

A well-designed object is one we don’t have to think about. It makes the right choice the easiest one.

Except for nature’s gifts, we have rarely obtained good design for free.

Regarding ease of use, and most kinds of quality, often building things is easier than designing things.

But to build, as I’m using the word, means the goal is to finish building. To design, or to design well, means the goal is to improve something for someone.

just because you built the thing the right way doesn’t mean you built the right thing.

unconscious incompetence, where a person is unaware that they are bad at something (which may remind you of certain friends or coworkers).

Much of the bad design in the world is the result of incompetence, unconscious or otherwise.

“The question about whether design is necessary or affordable is beside the point. Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.”

It turns out there are many logical reasons, however sad they might be, for why good design isn’t as common as we’d like.

There’s no official measure of, or license for, customer centricity. It’s just a label any organization can apply to itself at any time, without changing the quality of anything.

all too often, claiming to be customer centric is a kind of design theater: it’s just for show.

we can’t really say that something is well designed unless we identify what it’s going to be used for.

Good designers ask two questions throughout any project to make sure the context is well understood: What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for?

Eventually, smart organizations learn how good designers are at discovering these problems early on, when they’re cheaper and easier to solve.

we should resist judging how good or bad an idea is until we clarify the problem to solve and who we are solving it for.

Once you commit to good design and start thinking clearly, another layer of questions is always revealed.

Good questions lead to more good questions, just as good thinking leads to more good thinking.

terms like user-friendly or intuitive are as flawed as customer centric. They don’t mean anything without context, and used generically t...

that’s the point: “easy to use” is a marketing term more than one good designers use.

What we call “natural” depends on an accumulation of what we learn through culture.

We often fall into the trap of calling something intuitive if it makes sense to us, and call it hard to use if it doesn’t. This assumes that everyone has the same knowledge and culture (ours!).

Asking those healthy design questions puts our own sense of pleasure at risk, forcing our emotions and our reason to be in conflict.

so many things in life seem perfectly made for the people who made them, and few others.

Kamen started the Segway project with the goal of technology reuse: it was a technology in search of a new problem.

By starting with one real person, and one real problem, you’re guaranteed to satisfy a real need, without getting lost in the challenges of building or hubris.

if you can’t solve one real problem for one real person, it’s a good indicator that you probably can’t solve a problem for millions of people, either.

Our two important questions—what are you improving, and who for—are easy to ask. But there are many bad ways to answer them. The common mistake is to assume that you can think your way to answers.

An honest designer knows they have to invest in time listening to customers, quietly observing them as they do their work, or testing early design prototypes, to understand what the real needs are.

People with ambition can be terrible listeners.

Perhaps the most dangerous kind of design theater goes on in the designer’s own mind.

Even though design is a profession, every person in the world is a designer in some way. Everyone designs something

It’s unlikely for a person to go an entire day without designing something,

Design is basic to all human activity... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child.

A major difference today between professional designers and ordinary people is how thoughtful they are in making decisions.

Good designers, on the other hand, have a high bar for quality and thoughtfulness, both for their clients and, often, for themselves.

they know that the only way to get high quality is to explore many ideas and compare them against each other, along with a criteria list of what is good, before making decisions. This is why designers are notorious for asking many questions.

the good ones know that most people jump to conclusions faster than they should

Often, the biggest challenge is simply that the problem chosen isn’t the real one, or has been defined in a shallow way.

The first time most people work with a pro designer, it’s a surprise how much time they spend exploring different possible ideas.

Not only is picking the first option you come up with not how good design works, it’s not how good decision-making works, either.

Buying shoes has a sequence of steps (ha ha) that you must go through to arrive at a good solution. Design works in much the same way. It’s a process for finding and evaluating ideas to get good results.

The quality of the places where you live, work and play were shaped by designers long before you first experienced them, but their impact is often more profound.

“The straight line has become an absolute tyranny... cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; and the line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization.”

Designers are often trivialized as people whose job it is to “make things pretty,” but this is a mistake.

It assumes that function always matters more than appearance, and that style is a recent luxury in our history. There’s evidence that the opposite is true.

today, most of our status symbols are purchased, not made).

The idea that style is secondary also denies a truth about how our brains work and what drives our decisions.